Welcome to my (techlaw)life
Lately I’ve been fortunate to have time to reflect on where I am in life and where I want to be going. When we sold Groove Networks, a software company founded by Ray Ozzie, to Microsoft last year, I decided to take a mid-career breather to enjoy time with Ellis, who had just arrived, and to take stock. I gave myself permission to think expansively about the type of work I’d do next, and I considered some interesting options along the way, both inside and outside law. No surprises in the end: I ultimately decided to continue doing what I’ve always done, save a few years studying ethics and teaching law at Harvard, which is practicing corporate and IP law in the tech industry. I recently joined the Boston office of Holland + Knight.
One of the things I like about practicing law is that I get to participate in and influence some very interesting conversations – conversations with entrepreneurs about their ideas for changing the world; conversations with other lawyers and with policymakers about the legal and social implications of new technology; conversations with businesspeople about the right legal framework for commercializing their company’s technology or the right terms for a deal to which their technology is central. From 40,000 feet, I see the legal system as one big, ongoing conversation about how best to order public and private affairs. It’s a very disjointed conversation, to be sure. It takes place in courtrooms, conference rooms, and living rooms. (Yes, I even see litigants’ monologues in courtroom and the written opinions judges produce as part of this conversation, as I explain at length elsewhere.) Parts of this conversation occur in plain language and parts are overly coded; sometimes the tone is civil and sometimes it’s shrill. (It doesn’t have to be overly coded or shrill.) It’s a conversation about norms – what they are or should be, how to apply them, whether they are being observed, and, if not, what can and should be done.
Technology often disrupts existing norms or exposes the absence of norms in some domain, just as it often disrupts existing markets or creates new ones. Being a corporate and IP lawyer in the tech world is a great job for anyone who believes in the constructive potential of science and technology and who wants to help shape the social and economic spheres in ways that encourage and support technological innovation and appropriate uses of technology. The relationship between technology and norms is often recursive: as technology affects the world and begins to influence existing norms, social forces sometimes begin to influence how a technology evolves or is used.
A good example of this dynamic is what’s happened in the P2P arena over the last six or seven years. Groove is P2P. As a result, I spent a considerable amount of time engaged in conversations with lawyers who were drafting briefs in Napster and Grokster and with legislators and staffers who were drafting a seemingly endless stream of proposed legislation trying to put the media file sharing genie back in the bottle. Many people tended to think peer-to-peer was a synonym for music piracy in those days, but it’s of course just an application agnostic network architecture that has lots of potential uses. As legislators and judges (through hearings, judicial opinions, etc.) engaged in dialogue with the various stakeholders in the debate and began to understand the underlying technology, their positions on P2P and the norms that should govern its various uses became more nuanced. We began to see tweaks in pending legislation that sometimes demonstrated a sophisticated appreciation of technical differences among P2P systems and that distinguished between the varying intentions with which systems are designed, maintained, and used. We also began to see systems designed or redesigned to conform to evolving norms. Technology influencing conversations about norms and conversations about norms influencing technology.
This blog is one way I can continue to participate in the conversations that are occurring at the intersection of law, business, and scientific and technological innovation. I’ll focus on IT issues, but you’ll see an occasional post about biotech. I’m particularly interested in technological innovations that address social and environmental problems, so you’ll also see posts on topics like clean tech and emerging trends in corporate law, like CSR and alternate corporate paradigms. There will be the odd post about life as a lawyer (and maybe some posts about the odd life of a lawyer). And, there will be some posts on things eudemonic, a word I recently learned from a cardboard coaster at Starbucks.
Thanks for visiting, and please subscribe to my feeds if you’re inclined.
November 26th 2006, 12:48pm
— Peter Parkes, Nov 27th 2006, 8:52 pm